The Congress of 1776, speaking of religion, declared it was the “only solid basis of public liberty and happiness.” General Washington said it was “one of the great pillars of human happiness, and the firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens.” What could we gain by exchanging it for Deism, or Atheism, or Ingersollism? Infidelity proposes to break down the altars of prayer, take away our Bibles and our days of worship, shut up the doors against all our Sunday-schools and turn more than a million of children into the streets, away from sweet song and moralizing influences, and the pure morals of the gospel of Christ. This would bereave the living of his rule of life, and rob the dying of the antidote of death.
Shall we “unchain the Tiger”—unbelief? What would it bring us in return? Its doctrines are vague speculations, founded on neither data nor evidence; some of its supporters believe in some kind of a God, while some deny every God; some few believe in the immortality of the soul, while a majority, with the French infidels, write over the gates of their cemeteries, “Death is eternal sleep.”
In looking over the various infidel productions I think of the old saying, “Be sure you are right, and then go ahead.” There is no certainty in their speculations. They do not agree even in their so-called moral code, nor, as yet, in their doctrinal speculations.
Lord Herbert and the Earl of Shaftesbury thought that the light of nature would teach all men, without the aid of revelation, to observe the morality of the Bible. Spinosa and Hobbes, one believing in a God, and the other an Atheist, agreed that there was nothing that was either right or wrong in its own nature; and also agreed “that every man had a right to obtain, either by force or fraud, everything which either his reason or his passions prompted him to believe was useful to himself—duties to the State were his only duties.”
Blount, another Freethinker, supposed “that the moral law of nature justified self-murder.” Lord Bolingbroke claimed that it enjoined polygamy; and neither Blount nor Bolingbroke prohibited fornication, or adultery, or incest, except between parents and children.
But the vagueness and uncertainty of the doctrinal speculations of infidelity, and the looseness and immorality of its rules of life, are not the only objections to it. Its tendency, wherever it has been introduced in the history of our world, has been evil, and only evil. France, at the commencement of her revolution in 1789, was an infidel nation. The profligacy of the Catholic priesthood, and the demoralizing example of the Regent, Duke of Orleans, and the infidel publications of Voltaire and his associates, had produced a contempt for religion through every rank of society. The people of France were taught by their literati that the Bible was at war with [pg 187] their liberties; and that they could never expect to overturn the throne till they had, first, broken down the “altar.” here the tiger was unchained!
The lusts and passions of man were set free from the restraints of Christianity, and the bloody history of that nation, in its devotion to infidelity, should convince every man that infidelity only “unchained the tiger”! It did France no good, but much evil. In this state of things France needed revolution, as America did, and had she engaged in it, with as pious reliance upon God, “and with the hearts of her people deeply imbued with the morality of the Bible, the scion of liberty, carried in the honored Lafayette from this country,” would have taken deep root, and spread forth its branches; and ere this time the fairest portion of Europe might have reposed under its shadow. But her principles poisoned her morals, and her immorality disqualified her for freedom. After expending an incredible amount of treasure, and sacrificing more than two million of men, she consented to be ruled by a despot in hope of some protection from her own people, and in hope of some security against the animal which she had unchained.
With such facts before us, let us Americans decide, not merely as Christians, but as “patriots and fathers,” whether we will cling to the pure “Gospel of Jesus Christ,” given to us in the love of Heaven, and in the blood of Jesus, rather than accept in its stead the empty, Godless, Christless, good-for-nothing negative of God and Christ and Christianity. The chief article in the unbeliever's creed is in these words, “I believe in all unbelief.”
Will not our friends take interest enough in the Journal to increase its circulation. There is no reason why it should not be immediately doubled, and thus placed upon a solid basis. It is our intention to make it a thorough defense of the truth, so much so that all will relish it, and remember it with delight.